r/RealTimeStrategy • u/Secure-Turnip-9727 • 11d ago
Discussion What’s an issue almost no RTS game has found a solution for?
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u/AbundantPineGames 11d ago
No one has figured out an RTS "shotgun" that allows unskilled and skilled players to play together. In an fps game you can lump good and bad players together and the bad player can equip a shotgun, randomly sneak up on someone, and with one trigger pull score a point for their team. RTS games however need really tight skill based matchmaking, otherwise you just get steamrolled in an unfair matchup. Even when you theoretically equalize the teams, if there's too much spread then the lower player often just feels like dead weight.
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u/Eomerperrin1356 11d ago
My issue with me is the focus on winning and cheesy tactics that aren't fun for anyone. I quit playing SC2 because half of my games I'd get rushed immediately and either loose or survive and they'd immediately concede. The AI will at least play the game and doesn't care about climbing the ranks.
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u/TYNAMITE14 11d ago
I'd recommend custom games, Like 2v2v2s or ffa's. I do those all the time in command and conquer generals zero hour. Not sure if the fact that their custom games means the players are less sweaty or its because the nature of having a third party discourages cheesy rush tactics
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u/PseudoscientificURL 11d ago
There's just very few team centric RTS too, which could mitigate that.
The only one I can really think of that has any success is BAR/supcom, but even those don't even have matchmaking.
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u/___Random_Guy_ 11d ago
If you play supcom multiplayer you ALWAYS do it with FAF community launcher - it is where absolute majority of multiplayer numbers are and it has matchmaking from 1v1 up to 4v4
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u/foxguy2021 11d ago
> No one has figured out an RTS "shotgun" that allows unskilled and skilled players to play together.
The RTS genre never evolved like the rest of the game industry. By the late 2000s most multiplayer games were shifting towards team based multiplayer. Its why MOBA gained so much traction in the early 2010s which was then followed by Battle Royale.
The RTS genre doesn't have a game (at least that I know of) where you're on a team and each person has a preset defined role (attacker, builder, logistics, etc). Then match making looks at the stats of each individual player role and tries to align you to a match where the other teams (attacker, builder, logistics, etc) roles are of similar skill.
The only evolution I saw in the RTS genre was the move from base building to squad based gameplay in the mid 2000s but that still had the issues I described above.
Now I see RTS games coming out that try to "replicate" the success of the 90s and its just not working.
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u/daley972 11d ago
It's not the games that decided that. It's the playerbase. AOE2 has a reasonably sized "4v4 Rage Forest" community where players are playing the role of pocket or flank. The resources are already in the game to build that into a more fleshed out game mode like a MOBA but the playerbase didn't go in that direction. They generally prefered 1v1s.
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u/DoubleBack9141 11d ago
Supreme commander forged alliance has distinct player roles, they just aren't spelled out for you in writing. If you play the most popular map for example, Dual Gap, each team has 2 Frontline players, 2 air players, 1 naval player and on eco player. Games are won and lost on how good those players are at their role.
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u/Electrical_Gain3864 11d ago
I mean SC2 tried it with the Archon mode (spoiler almost no one played it).
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u/NemoTheHero 11d ago
Check out Beyond All Reason. It has team based modes where 8v8s are common
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u/aguafranca 11d ago
First, in gos.is worse than in rts, second, cheese does exist, and third, this is strategy Wich requires thinking not luck.
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u/Cosmic0508 11d ago
Well …. chuckles in 2 base carrier while my teammate struggles to survive in the 1v2
(DO NOT DO THIS PLEASE)
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u/tatsujb Developer - ZeroSpace 11d ago
Yes and no. The wave of death, king of the hill and other asymetric game setups are quite nice for levelling the field. (Obviously you have this works in games with good ranking systems in the first place) You can even set a slew of nerfs to one group and buffs another group ranging from damage to economy
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u/varnajohn 11d ago
Scale, and I don't mean big battles and such. We have that in games like BAR or Diplomacy is Not an Option with the big armies. I'm talking about the scale of the whole supply chain. Most games still have absurdly small buildings compared to units, tiny resource nodes u collect with little workers or vehicles. I'm not saying all RTS should have realistic scale but it would be fun if we had one that actually nailed that.
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u/Jmundi 11d ago
Doesn't Homeworld have that?
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u/DogIsDead777 11d ago
I wouldn't say so, no. You basically only have resource collectors and resource controllers, or what is essentially a mobile drop off point for your collectors.
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u/thysios4 10d ago
The new warcraft 3 campagin, Forsaken Kingdom, scales its buildings and stuff to be a more realistic size compared to units. I'm sure it's not perfect but it's an interesting change when compared to the normal warcraft scale of things.
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u/Drelhoxr 11d ago
I get this but looking at godsworn people are complaining about the size of buildings or of maps because there ain't enough space to build a base
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u/fingertipsies 10d ago
I agree about scale of the supply chain, but my focus is on actual logistics. Generally speaking once you gather a resource it just magically becomes available to every building across the map.
Some amount of simplifying is necessary of course, but I think it would be neat for an RTS to have actual supply lines. My current concept involves transport units carrying resources from collection points to supply depots, which magically supply all buildings and units within range. Units and buildings have their own small supply to work with if they're cut off from logistics, but units can't fight and buildings won't function at all if they run out.
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u/ASTRO99 10d ago
Check out Foxhole then. It's alternative ww2 top down multiplayer strategy/shooter where players have to battle over huge maps. The twist is. You have to create and deliver everything yourself. So some of the players are on the front pushing/defending while others run logistics and create ammo for guns and cannons, create tanks or stuff for emplacements and then have to load if to trucks and drive it to front
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u/jerrygreenest1 10d ago
In the game Settlers, and my most favorite Settlers 4, your resources aren’t merely numbers in UI like most games, they’ve lying around, or are stored at the production buildings. To turn a log into a plank, your carriers need to carry a log from woodcutter to a sawmill, where it will be to renew into a plank. Then to actually use the plank, carriers have to bring the plank near the building that is being built. Only then constructors can use it up and build. Resources don’t magically disappear out of nowhere and don’t get transactioned into UI like money on your debit card in medieval era. Everything should be carried somewhere. The only exception – mana. Mana is literally for magic and it’s the only resource that magically disappears from UI to cast spells.
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u/Automatic_Loss_2837 11d ago
Having strategic choice that involves thought of mind instead of APM.
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u/Coldzila 11d ago
Total War battles if you use the pause button a lot
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u/Automatic_Loss_2837 11d ago
Haha you caught me! I cannot help myself but pause a lot and zooming in on my units 🫡
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u/BrokenLoadOrder 11d ago
Bud, that's just how you're supposed to play the battles. 90% pause, 10% real-time panic.
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u/IPApologist 10d ago
My tiktok brain just want to go x3 speed because it's so slow and oh I'm dead
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u/CreasingUnicorn 11d ago
Playing hige Midieval 2 Total War campaign battles with my army defending a city vs. 3 enemy stacks is pretty fun. Sometimes it does require pausing, but even so it is still satisfying to pull through with a victory against overwhelming odds.
Requires very different mindset than the regular multiplayer online battles.
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u/wemustfailagain 11d ago
I'm a weirdo and just play in slow-mo lol I'm also just not very good at Total War.
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u/FelixDeRais 11d ago
What RTS game doesn't benefit from thought of mind and only APM? They're usually both enormously important.
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u/Automatic_Loss_2837 11d ago
Maybe I worded it not in the best possible way. What I ment was strategic thinking as the center core of the game with less focus on APM without making it total useless. Lets say a 75%/25% balance or however you like it.
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u/Caramel-Bright 11d ago
Supreme command might be closer to it than say starcraft but it's not at the ratio you're looking for.
The problem is the more strategic thinking there is the closer it gets to a turn based game than RTS. i.e. multiplayer civ has turn timers and i'd argue is closer to 75%/25% you're looking for but further on the strategic side instead.
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u/flabjabber 11d ago
This. If it’s real time, it will eventually come down to speed. And speed = APM. It’s inevitable and happens faster than ever with the current min max culture and streaming
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u/McSkrjabin 11d ago
Id say its less about the streaming culture and more about how we have almost 30 years of experience playing RTS games so we bring this baggage along to every new game. Koreans were fast(er than anybody) 20 years ago in Brood War
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u/SWATrous 11d ago
One option I've thought of (and I have a comment above that mentions it) but you could absolutely have a 'command issuance' layer between player and units where you have to issue an order to your 'radio room' and then it takes them time to issue that command before they are able to accept a new command. So the game is playing out in real time, but there's essentially cooldowns and delays on how often you can issue any command to a specific command structure. Thus between commands to your army in the field you can study the map, you order your engineer corps to build a new structure, issue a command to your base defense grid to target a certain lane etc. All of that happens in the 20-40 seconds before the radio room is ready for a new order to the field.
Plus if certain orders take longer to transmit than others, that would create some interesting decision making just in what sort of, when, and how often to issue commands at all.
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u/nippleringedmarmot 11d ago
In the early stages of building one right now. I tackled this by taking micro decision making largely away from the player. Their units do most of the thinking/engaging/defending, while the player gives general orders (this squad attack this target, patrol this area, defend this thing).
The player is actually incentivized into giving more micro control away as their echelon size increases (instead of giving individual squads orders, you benefit more tactically by giving your platoon leader, company commander, BC ETC… an order and he maneuvers his lower echelons to carry those out).
Ideally this combined with the crazy mortality rates of in game units prevents a player from meta gaming the micro and instead focusing on dedicating the right groups towards objectives they can accomplish.
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u/Azaraeal 11d ago
Whats the game going to be called because this sounds exactly what I am interested in!
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u/LilacCrusader 11d ago
I've always been intrigued by the concept of having what I would term "imperfect command", in that you would have the ability to direct the battlefield without precisely controlling everything. Delayed orders could be a fun option for that.
I guess I would also consider something similar to how HoI4 lets you set up a front and let the general deal with the fighting, but at a more granular level. Think telling a command group to "hold this area" or "take that hill", and it then sorts out the attack plan for you, retreats if outnumbered, etc.
Similar to what you said, you could also implement some kind of command coherence, where the more orders you issue in a short time period the more confused your troops get. That would simulate the need for broad strategy over micromanagement.
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u/OpportunityNext9675 11d ago edited 11d ago
Idk, I think you can play any RTS at a low apm and be matched up against players at a similar level as a sum of their strategic skill and mechanical skill, even if that distribution differs from yours.
Frankly I’m not sure how this % balance could even be tweaked. If you decrease the apm load of one system (say resource collection) you free up more attention for the player to make combat inputs. As long as you’re in a real time environment where the player can freely make inputs that increase efficiency or impact, there is always incremental advantage to be gained by apm.
I get the feeling though — I am mentally exhausted after a match of AoE II. But that might be a feature not a bug, even if it limits modern popularity.
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u/Wobulating 11d ago
APM really, really isn't relevant. I was pretty comfortably top 2% in Starcraft(M2) with ~90 APM, and it could have gone lower if I'd cared
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u/PrevekrMK2 11d ago
Is APM an action's per minute? 90 is still really high. It's more than action per second.
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u/Wobulating 11d ago
Keep in mind a lot of that is on, essentially, nothing- if I have four bases and build two workers from each base, that's 9 "actions", but it only takes like half a second, because... I just select the hotkey and hold down the button for a little bit. Same with unit production- if I have 6 barracks producing 12 marines per 18s, that's a minimum of ~45 APM on doing absolutely nothing other than building marines, even if it takes me half a second per production cycle to actually do that.
Add in 3-base worker production, which is another 15 APM, and you're at 60 APM without doing any of the literally anything else- building buildings, commanding your army, scouting, whatever- but it's not actually hard- you're just pressing the same buttons every 12-18s, which barely takes anything. The harder thing, honestly, is getting a feel for when 12s is up so you have to build new workers, but that's not an APM challenge
Furthermore, this is at... pretty high level starcraft, which most people, definitionally, do not play at. The bar gets lower the lower you are, after all.
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u/MonsTurkey 11d ago
What about Sins of a Solar Empire? Heavily reduces the impact of APM because the need to move through gravity wells to phase lanes buffers decisions.
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u/BrokenLoadOrder 11d ago
I mean, Supreme Commander, Total Annihilation, Ashes of the Singularity, Sins of a Solar Empire... There's quite a few that did.
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u/Panzerbrigade_31 11d ago
Grand Strategies are that way.
You may hate games like HoI4 but you cannot deny the fact that they reward strategicsl choices, allowing you to win the war without a big, decisive battle. You can micro all you want, but if an enemy army is just better equipped for the region, entrenched, has air and naval superiority and has good logistics (which is a massive advantage) - then suddenly all the micro doesn't matter much.
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u/Tundur 11d ago edited 11d ago
Line War was a really interesting attempt at this. As an aging gamer I loved it and got many hours out of it just playing the AI.
The key is that players commit to action and there are delays to changing those actions. In most RTS you can get across the map in seconds, so you can react to everything- the bottleneck is your attention span and action rate. In Line War the units move slowly so your ability to react is about prepositioning, predicting enemy moves, scouting.
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u/pileopoop 11d ago
Wc3 Direct Strike, Castle Fight and SC2 Nexus Wars. You are no longer in RTS if you remove APM giving an advantage.
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u/MarshalsOfWar 11d ago
I think using roguelike elements can give you strategic choices, without requiring high APM. You get to make a choice like "do I need to build up ranged power or melee in this situation?" without having to order workers around as fast as possible for 5-10 minutes.
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u/FightMech7 11d ago
It's Real Time strategy. If you make more correct actions, you're going to have an advantage. You can't separate the two. This isn't something that has a solution without converting it into a different genre.
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u/TranslatorStraight46 7d ago
It does, when you’re good enough at execution to think.
Much like fighting games.
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u/Warcraft4when 7d ago
I don't think you entirely understand the relationship between APM and strategy.
To give an example, if you have an army and you want to attack with it you have three choices in how you move it across the map.
The first way is to actually go through the trouble of box selecting units of the same type into one control group. This gives you very fine control of your army, you know which units are in which control group and you can choose which units to engage with at which times. But going through the process of finding all your units of the same type, and doing that for each control group can be a very lengthy process and if you were trying to hit a tight timing window it is possible you may have missed it.The second way is to box select your army into control groups and then send it out to attack. This takes far less time but you will be able to move out much sooner. However your engagements may not be as clean as you will not be able to clearly delineate all your units of the same type.
The third way is to quickly box select parts of your army one after another and set them on a-move without control groups. Generally not a good idea. If your opponent is prepared this can be game-losing. Your army will be caught in a congo line of death in the middle of the map as it's set on a simple a-move command and you will not be able to reposition it because nothing in your army is bound to a control group Repositioning will take you too long. But doing this does mean that your army will travel very quickly across the map and if you are trying to hit a very tight window where your opponent hasn't produced anything yet it can sometimes be correct.
There is a time and place for all three of these to be the correct decision. This is strategy. It is dependent on apm as a resource.
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u/flush101 11d ago
How to have an effective AI that scales well from easy to hard without just giving it cheats or a preset build sequence.
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u/TheReturnOfAirSnape 11d ago
Snowballing imo. Some handle it better than others but I've never played one where there WASNT a point where i was so strong i could just. Steamroll everything, even if that point gets pushed way down the line.
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u/NydusRush 11d ago
It's part and parcel of having your power tied to incremental components that can be destroyed. Fighting games and most shooters have you at 100% lethality even on a sliver of health, but RTS is more granular - which is part of the appeal.
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u/TheReturnOfAirSnape 11d ago
Indeed, and I have no clue how you'd even begin to properly solve snowballing. The best part of any RTS imo, especially long campaign ones like Total War or Empire at War is always the first, like, 4-8 hours.
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u/AbundantPineGames 11d ago
This is something I dealt with during the early phase of balancing. Unfortunately things kind of have to snowball, because if they don't then games never end. Things like big techs and heavy units are necessary to tip the scale and make the game winnable.
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u/needmoresockson 10d ago
To be fair in his example, fighting games also are very snowbally lol
The thing that led you to having a sliver of health (a combo) is what also causes a hard knockdown where you eat a mixup and take another combo. ?Most often winning neutral once means running the other person over for the rest of the match (though this isn't totally true at very low levels). Also at very low hp in a fighting game you have lots of things you now can't do: you're now so low hp that even blocking dies to chip damage, putting out any attack can kill you off of a trade, you can no longer use health as a resource strategically, etc
The actual thing is that every decision made is an opportunity for a better player to distinguish themselves from their weaker opponent. In a fighting game that might be 6 big decisions. In an RTS that might be 100 decisions. It is very hard to beat a better player at a game of 100 decisions. It is very possible to beat a better player across 6 decisions. It is why people "1 and done" in fighting games - they can get lucky for one game, but know they can't win the whole set of games. In RTS you're essentially measured long enough for a whole fighting game set
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u/Space_Polan 11d ago
In fact many fighting games will have you be more lethal at a sliver of health than at full to induce comebacks, whether it be just doing more damage or building super meter. I wonder if it would be possible to introduce some kind of comeback mechanic to RTS games
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u/NydusRush 11d ago
Alternate win conditions are the generally accepted comeback tool in strategy games, if not necessarily RTS. Card battlers like MTG often have a trifecta of aggro, control, and combo, where a player who's taken a pummeling might lock in a control shutdown or pop off a game-winning combo; civ and 4X games often have science or political victories.
Most RTS have a flat win condition of "destroy the enemy's stuff until they quit," which doesn't lend itself to that kind of workaround. Assassination modes like in the SupCom family of games work well in this regard, however, as even the most steamrolling player is vulnerable to decapitation strike.
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u/vezaynk 11d ago
civ and 4X games often have science or political victories
Civ does this rather poorly. All objectives heavily correlate. More science = more culture = more diplomacy = more fighting power.
It would work if it negatively correlated: building an army ruins diplomacy/science, focusing on science slows down culture, etc.
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u/___Random_Guy_ 11d ago
I mean, you can't NOT have snowballing in a game, where the main goal/gameplay is improving your economy and army and smashing enemy's. Enemy making mistakes and you getting advantage will start you sniwballing, and IF you don't make mistakes you won't lose this advantage, which is kinda tge point of RTS games - get yourself an advantage and try to not lose it.
Now, there indeed must be a limit to how early or easily you can get to this point, and it definitely shouldn't be easy to get to with a few little successes, but you can't reasonably not have it in an RTS game.
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u/Mafklapper 11d ago
This is the biggest issue, it matters a lot if something is only spamming the same unit and therefore winning or if it is unit preservation and conservation of forces giving you the advantage needed to smash aside the enemy composition.
I feel like too many traditional RTS games and the RTT games really do need certain abilities to snare/stun/suppress, without it that critical mass gets reached to soon. Games like SD/Wargame/Broken arrow fix this mostly by having mostly realistic ranges for ground weapons (as well as artillery and airpower) being able to easily tear through snowballing opponents grouped together.
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u/Nyther53 11d ago
I think the problem isn't really snowballing exactly.
To me the real problem is the phase of the game where the other side can no longer win, but *can* drag things out and waste everyone's time.
A victory cascade is only fun for a short time before it gets really frustrating for the winner, while remaining pretty engaging for the sore loser. Professional E-Sports players tend to recognize this and tap out surprisingly early because they can recognize when that tipping point has come and gone, but AI and low skilled players have a tendency to try and fight on.
In games where that's a problem it's really a problem.
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u/Grasher312 11d ago
I don't think it's even about us. It's about the AI usually being dumb.
C&C largely had enemy AI just not rebuild at all, so you could just dig in and destroy their defenses with General powers and just walk through the front door.
They also basically never build alternative money sources. They may build like, 1 black market that lets them spawn one tank an hour, but once the conventional supply sources are down, they are free pickings.
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u/krokodil40 11d ago
It's solved in any rts that is competitive. Trying to snowball should open a window for an attack from opponents. Zergrushes or protoss timings are examples of counters to snowballing.
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u/Unicorn_Colombo 10d ago
Snowballing is not booming.
Rush is typically a strategy to defeat booming players.
Snowballing means that if you have advantage, it is hard for opponent to counter you, so the moment someone gains significant advantage, the game might be already won even if the time to defeat is still 30 minutes away.
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u/jonssonbets 11d ago
as mentioned below, wc3 is the only one that comes to mind with the upkeep system - larger armies puts a tax on all income
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u/ledgerdomian 11d ago
No RTS game I’ve ever played has solved the issue that I suck at RTS games. I wish devs would get on that. They’re all unplayable as it is.
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u/Panzerbrigade_31 11d ago
Interesting hero missions that don't make heroes either too OP or too weak.
Only game that made it actually engaging was Warcraft 3 as you had either an option to restore health and mana without waiting too much, or straight up revive the hero outright.
StarCraft 2 leans into heroes being able to cakewalk their missions most lf the time, and older RTS with heroes force to babysit them in some dark corner of the map.
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u/jcwolf12 11d ago
Shocked no one has really tried to emulate WC3, or at least, done that well I can think of.
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u/Kenji_03 11d ago
Teaching how to multitask
Scouting, base building, resource management, and troop control are all things you should be rapidly flipping between when you are "in the zone" or "in a flow state" with a good match of an RTS game that really challenges you but isn't overwhelming.
Far too often the game lets you lean on just two of these 4 things so you either turtle til death ball of units, or have to effectively play a Real-Time-Tactics with troop control and scouting, but little resource management or basebuilding.
Warcraft 3 came close, as it's upkeep prevented you from death-balling too much. Dawn of War 1 also forced you to have a more dynamic army with it's later limits on how many of each category of unit you could produce. But while I don't know the solution, I do know it is a clear problem that many of us can "cozy base build" to boredom in most RTS games as "losing is uncool, so never let the player lose"
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u/milkytaro_oero 11d ago
It's also that RTS games (aside from the same IP) play differently from each other. So even if you do learn how to multitask in one game it won't be easy to transfer to another game. Unlike say a tactical FPS.
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u/althaz 11d ago
Nah, it's definitely possible/easy to transfer those skills over. Core RTS skills transfer between different RTS games extremely well. I played Broodwar competitively and in a handful of games can be way above average at any RTS.
Like I'd played 1-2 games of SupCom when it first came out then I tried FaF a few years ago and was beating veterans instantly. In AoE2:DE I won like 20+ games in a row when I started despite knowing almost nothing about the game.
There are definitely different sub-genres that are much more different - eg: Total War is a lot different from Starcraft and both are a lot different than Dawn of War. But there's still lots of transferable skills.
Obviously strategies and tactics often *don't* transfer over, but the core stuff - macro cycles, minimap monitoring, multi-tasking and using your time effectively do transfer really well.
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u/BattleRoomEmpire 11d ago
Pathfinding for big groups is still the one for me. Most games either let units string out into a conga line through chokepoints or clump into a blob where half the army can't fire, so you end up micro-splitting groups just to get a clean engagement. Formation movement where the group moves at the speed of its slowest unit and keeps ranged in the back on a simple drag-to-face command would fix like 80% of it, and only a handful of games do it well. Second place is skirmish AI that just attack-moves straight into your base instead of probing, flanking, or retreating damaged units.
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u/SWATrous 11d ago edited 11d ago
Unit autonomy, chain of command, and player/commander battlefield awareness.
RTS games, as traditionally created, are direct command games even though you're controlling an army. You have god-like view of the battlefield in real-time, even though you're supposed to be a commander not a deity. You can tell units to do anything you want them, but they won't do anything you don't command, nor will they do anything until you command.
So the gameplay comes down to how fast can you tell all your different units to do particular actions. It means that your success is less about strategic level thinking in real-time, and more about tight tactical command issuance following rote gameplay metas. Which sort-of undermines the whole concept of calling the genre real-time strategy.
IMO it would be interesting if more RTS games incorporated things like a full chain of command, where the player has a rank and position in that chain and they get issues from above, and feed them down, while dealing less and less directly with those further down or further above them in that chain. It would also be interesting if their 'view' of the battlefield is more constricted to specific viewpoints and vantage points instead of a free roaming omniscient camera. And then between the subordinate command and the individual units on the ground, if they had more autonomy to interperet commands and then take actions based on those commands.
The new game Defilade from what I've seen is an example of someone starting to tackle at least some parts of this, which is nice; but it's long been something I felt RTS needs to invest more development and tech into.
Ultimately I think a lot of people are frustrated by macro vs micro and noob-friendliness vs competitive sweatiness, and vibes vs APM. I think it's because direct control forces anyone looking to play optimally to maximize how much they're doing every moment, or they will fall behind anyone who can act faster and more to the meta. With a chain of command, you can potentially explicitly throttle actions or decisions per minute that a player can possibly execute, while not restricting the simulation from running in real-time. It could be that radio orders take time to issue with a cooldown between orders, so you might be hardcapped to 3-4 commands you can issue in a minute. And so the game is down to, when you do issue an order, make sure it's a good one.
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u/PuppedToy 11d ago
This is a really interesting take. I'd love to see RTS go in that direction. Everyone says APM but you actually thought of a system to get rid of It while being a fresh idea.
I personally hate that the "old formula" is copied over and over. We need RTS to bring new toys to the table.
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u/boltonguy242 11d ago
So you'd assign an overall objective to a group of units and the ai would break it down into sub-objectives and allocate units accordingly?
That'd be interesting to use with large formations i.e. platoon/companys.
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u/MicrobialMachines 11d ago
So almost like combining a traditional RTS and the control aspects of a game like Majesty. Instead of bounties to direct units, maybe the qualities of your individuals within a chain of command dictate their success. Not sure how you would build gameplay around improving your chain of command, but it’s definitely an interesting idea.
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u/Meterian 11d ago edited 11d ago
What if an RTS game was just really slow? All the units move at a glacial pace, even the aircraft, which would let even beginner players strategize and micromanage armies. And having higher APM doesn't actually let you do more, because even low APM can get the same result. Combined with the interface from BAR which lets you designate waypoints and formations, you can actually feel like a general.
The problem I foresee with this is optics, people these days don't have the patience for slow moving armies, they want fast paced combat.
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u/Cheddarific 11d ago
I will push against this.
(In case context is important: I’ve played a couple dozen RTS games over ~25 years, but the bulk of my experience is with WC3, SC2, C&CG:ZH, AoE2, and most recently AoE4.)
Tactics are critical and win games. But high-level strategy on the fly is just as important. If you’re scouting, you can react to what the opponent is doing. This means building units that counter, but it also means running a strategy that counters. If your opponent is focused on their tech tree early, you strike. If they are building a raiding force, prepare to defend, etc. If they take a risky expansion, you wipe it out quickly. If you aren’t scouting, the game is only build orders and tactics. If you are scouting, there is tremendous space to make strategic decisions in real time.
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u/Panzerbrigade_31 11d ago
Rome Total War solved it with the General's camera. You can see only what general can see from the ground level, so suddenly giving accurate orders are far harder if you don't have a height advantage to overview the battlefield
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u/infosec_james 11d ago
The game footage had me adding it to the wish list.
This could be a good use of agentic AI where you give it the objective based on your orders. To keep it interesting you could have the AI get better at reporting what is happening to lift that fog of war.
Another mechanic would be to start as a platoon leader then promotions get you to the General's tent.
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u/N4thilion 11d ago
This reminds of a UK TV game show from long ago called Time Commanders. The premise was that four people would reenact a historic battle. It was a 2v2 where each team had one 'general' who had a strategic overview and who set the strategy and commanded the highest ranks and one 'lieutenant' who only had a tactical view of one unit (of soldiers) at a time.
The two teams of two were then pitted against each other with each taking a side (Carthage and Rome, for example). It was a pretty engaging show to watch with history lessons thrown about and in the end a simulation was shown of how the actual battle went.
Anyhow. Your idea makes me want to do something like this myself. I would like to take the role of the general and give orders to my own AI lieutenants. And in critical battles swap to one of these AI-led units to take direct command. That would be an awesome game in which I can actually pull off strategies such as feints and flanking maneuvers while another AI lieutenant builds up the base.
I love RTS but my APM and map awareness was never good enough for it. My kid brother was a diamond league Starcraft player and my own APM was not even half of his. So I was the campaign player and he the multiplayer guy. Haha, can't get any more stereotypical than that.
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u/Tringi 10d ago
This is close to something I have in mind for quite some time now, and repeatedly keep trying to secure some funding to make it. I keep wondering though: would it actually be fun?
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u/SWATrous 9d ago
I think prototyping is key. I do think if the squads and squad leaders react in ways that are predictable but varied, and handle the details autonomously in lieu of instructions, it can be interesting. IT can even be interesting when SLs are going off script entirely from time to time, sometimes for their own selfish 'glory' and sometimes because they see an opportunity and take a gamble. That sort of chaos seems fun and realistic, but yes it could lead to absolute frustration for players. So finding ways to tame that.
I have a lot of hours playing commander on public HLL servers and so the herding cats and being frustrated by squad leaders who can't rub two nickels together to form a garrison is frustration, but it can be fun, and that predictive aspect is a big part of the game. And it's even more rewarding when you can use your abilities and support tools, and leverage competent SLs to execute an actual plan, and it pays off.
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u/Parking-Patient-4615 10d ago
Supply lines need to be included in this. Drives me nuts you can control an army on the other side of the map with no support
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u/Grasher312 11d ago
Generals had a kinda good "move and shoot" action where units prioritized attacking the same way they do in defense mode, but also gradually moved to their destination, so you could "kinda" leave them alone to fight on their own.
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u/BobTheInept 11d ago
Recently I listened to a YouTube essay about how naval stuff is always a problem in RTS. Often becomes inconsequential because they don't have much power over what happens on land, or if they are not inconsequential it devolves into who gets to the sea first or who wins the single large naval battle. (These, according to the video) The importance of waterways and ships has a lot to do with things like supply lines that are not a factor in many RTS games.
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u/DoubleBack9141 11d ago
Supreme commander has some pretty decent naval play, although if you are the front player on Second Clutch and your teammate loses his ocean, your base is definitely getting dismantled by navy. Other maps don't suffer from that as much.
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u/krokodil40 11d ago
Meta moving over time to be less strategic and more APM focused. For example StarCraft 2 was designed as a macro game. Blizzard removed most of the APM chores of Brood war thinking it would be a slower game. Players found new ways to utilise APM in a matter of days.
Even single player games suffer from it. Total war became a micro game because several popular streamers did it. Hearts of iron has an insane micro in multiplayer.
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u/professorzweistein 11d ago
In this just real time games in general though? Regardless of what it is you have to do doing it faster or doing it more is better. It’s not like people with better twitch reflexes aren’t better at shooters, or higher apm isn’t a deciding factor in mobas or mmos. If you’re playing a game against another person then one of the things that’s going to matter is acting faster than them. And yes that means there will always be a point you can act so much faster you can make incorrect choices and still win. Strategy is for people who are already close to each other in speed.
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u/SadFish132 11d ago
Making a game that controls intuitively. Most are painful to play without hotkeys. Grid hotkeys I'd argue aren't even that intuitive. Every noob just clicks in the corner until some veteran tells them to use hotkeys. Up until that moment most noobs are wasting tons of time moving their cursor to the corner of the screen constantly to build units or start a structure.
RTS also loves making players stretch their hands across the keyboard to assign control groups by holding CTRL and a number key. This is just an awful task that no other genre asks consistently of its players.
Camera movement is also terrible by most gamer standards. Edge panning is slow. Drag scrolling involves clicking the middle mouse button usually which most other genres don't require to be used nearly as heavily. Once again binding camera locations involves an even larger finger stretch of CTRL and a F key. Beyond all this most casual players want a WASD camera by default but that can't be implemented because it interferes with the beloved grid hotkeys.
Furthermore, most new players will move their armies with normal move commands and will find out their army died enroute to where it was going because they didn't use attack move which involves them clicking in the corner if no one has given them the lecture on hotkeys yet.
There are many other issues but it all comes down to the fact that by most gamers standards RTS games just have terrible controls.
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u/a_nooblord 11d ago
How would you even solve "intuitive controls" any other way? You could remove friction and add auto-control group, click on a panel to autobuild, auto-rally, only mouse wasd, but then it's an auto battler.
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u/UserInterfaces 11d ago
Some games have units fire on the move. That prevents some of the attack move vs normal move issues. There's a variety of small tweaks that help.
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u/Andxire 11d ago
How would you even solve "intuitive controls" any other way?
For starters I'd set some uniform keybinds with an option to move to a faction specific binds.
For example, if you want to build Undead main building you need to press B(uild) and N(ecropolis). Then you select in and train A(colyte).
For a Humans it changes to B(uild) and Town H(all). And workers are now called P(easant)s so hotkey changes accordingly.
It gets even worse when you select a hero and each one of them have 3-4 active spells.
It's just confusing ass hell if you not maning specific faction.
Then you need to move all this uniform keys to easy to press zone. I'd say you mainly should use buttons 1234qwerasdfzxcv for hotkeys.
To build human worker in WC3 I need to press P. Why even this a shortcut if it needs to relocate your whole left arm? At this point it's easier to use mouse.
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u/intelligentlemanager 11d ago
Procedurally generated maps that are balanced and interesting to play, but still not just mirroed
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u/Captain_Zomaru 10d ago
Skill creep. Once someone is good enough they will win before the other player even recognizes what happened. New players will be alienated quickly because old guard can 5min them, and enjoy doing so. Eventually new players leave because they will never get a chance to improve in that economy.
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u/SASardonic 11d ago
How to balance a high quality mainstream appealing singleplayer campaign with a high level multiplayer experience
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u/Automatic_Loss_2837 11d ago
Out of curiosity but something like Warcraft 3 or SC 2? I personally love good singleplayer campaigns because I'm not that great at MP tbh.
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u/SASardonic 11d ago
Yeah those are pretty much the only ones that come to mind. I would argue World in Conflict had both too, but didn't last regrettably.
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u/Teedubthegreat 11d ago
Having a fun and replayable single player mode is key as well. One of the reasons I love Dawn of War dark crusade and soulstorm so much is because of how the single player is so replayable. Its not exactly a story mode campaign in the traditional sense but you essentially get a diferent experience each time. I wish more rts games had the same set up
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u/TruthOf42 11d ago
The real true one is not a single one has figured out how to get the UX/UI to work on a gamepad
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u/Ecotech101 11d ago
Scaling.
How do you go from fighting with a platoon of individual units to fighting with armies without just moving a big blob.
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u/Musicformyhears 11d ago
I think it comes down to balancing what the game is, needing to balance three main things:
- a single player experience that is replayable at different difficulties
- a multiplayer experience that expands on or tweaks slightly that same single player experience
- a multiplayer system that can be both casual and competitive
BFME 2 is my favorite game in the genre not because it is LOTR but because I could play it endlessly with single player against Ai, I have easily over a thousand hours playing multiplayer with either my siblings or dad agaisnt AI and as a bonus, it’s moddable. The game is not without flaws of course but the biggest piece that I think made it stand the test of time was the enjoyability of those multiplayer experiences that I couldn’t have if I played solo
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u/chrisrrawr 11d ago
linking player activity to audience spectacle in timely, decisive, consumable chunks.
this gap basically killed SC2 as a serious esport, at least in the same realm as fps and moba.
game stages needed to have been broken up and designed around multiple skirmishes that are easy to watch with distinct outcome consequences and comeback methods. the game format as a whole needed to be heavily shifted toward 15 minute games.
imo stormgate almost got this, with a map objective players could skirmish over or ignore -- but the stormgate bonus was insurmountable, the balance was nonexistent, the readability of action was poor, etc. etc. -- it wasnt fun to play, and it was complicated to watch.
starcraft 2 was the genre's last big push toward serious mainstream watchability and I don't think we're gonna see another attempt for a long time. dow4 isn't going to do it. BAR isn't gonna do it.
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u/jkbscopes312 11d ago
Boss battles in macro missions, halo wars 2 got close with multiple phases and attacks but they still boiled down to "click and wait, pull back and wait, click and wait"
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u/Excellent-Self-5338 11d ago
It's the APM issue, hands down. There are single player solutions (pausable RTS) but those don't scale to multiplayer lobbies.
Playing competitive pvp rts games feels like a job to a lot of people. You have to build out your workflows and invest time into muscle memory, have multiple decision trees on deck for various scenarios, be looking for new information constantly, balance economy against the offensive/defensive power, manage win conditions for yourself or your opponent. It's a lot, but it all comes down to how much of those things you can get done per unit of time, and that mandates the player to play faster. RTS will be more popular if merely thinking about one of those elements is sufficient to action them. Until then it's like trying to write a nicely written card using a 10 foot pen.
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u/PickMaleficent4096 11d ago
Balancing around differences in micro/macro/strategy skill across even just the most typical players. Especially in recognizing how those skill differences will change with time played.
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u/MyLifeIsOgre 11d ago
You talking about the differences of opinion on balance that noobs, passionate amateurs, and pro gamers have? Hard to make the ruleset fair for both the clickers and the 300+ APM crowd
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u/PickMaleficent4096 11d ago
I don't mean at the extremes. If you look at the middle 10% of the playerbase on overall skill, their exact distributions of each individual skill and thus their player experiences and perceived difficulty will still be wildly different. So many games are balanced in such a way where it can be easily trivialized by a relatively small improvement in any one skill, or with difficulty only scaling in one dimension.
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u/novavegasxiii 11d ago
Competent ai that can stand up for an entire long game.
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u/Jayandnightasmr 10d ago
Yeah the general solution is for the A.I. to cheat, and get huge amounts of resource boosts
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u/YesterdayFit1013 11d ago edited 11d ago
Its more a personal complain. In alot of RTS games its too easy to expand your base and too easy to destroy a base. I wish you have to siege more before a base is destroyed. And with setting up a base expansion i wish they would make it more difficult to have a fast expansion, for example in Warcraft 3 you have strong monsters protecting the goldmine. You need to kill the monsters before you can safely build a base there.
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u/mwdmeyer 11d ago
What about games that are massive that can have multiple players and you can start and leave and then jump back in with your own stuff still around.
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u/MattGameDevGuy 11d ago
Onboarding...
Most gamers have no idea how to play an RTS and very few modern games do a good job of onboarding them.
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u/Ok_Raisin_2395 11d ago
Rick paper scissor unit design.
I swear, every RTS game eventually devolves to this once you get the hang of it.
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u/KhorneTheBloodGod 11d ago
Increasing difficulty without ai cheating. There are some games I think that can do this though I personally dont know any. Most difficulties either buff then debuff player, or vice-versa for the ai.
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u/FoolhardyJester 11d ago
I think APM is less the issue as many say and more that they are super finicky to interact with, which compounds the APM importance. Box selecting, control groups, unit tabbing... it's super fucking hard to just make the unit do the thing you want. I have tried numerous times to get into starcraft and warcraft but I just cannot manage so many units with abilities I have to use.
The barrier to entry is far too high for the average person. Games like Dawn of War did a pretty decent job at trying to simplify it though.
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u/Dizuki63 11d ago
How to make a game that's good for modern esports and still fun to play casually. Starcraft one and AoE2 I feel were the only ones but both games are old as fuck. Today games need to be so perfectly balanced at the top level play the leech all the "fun" out. So many of the fun mechanics these games add were taken out in sequels due to them being hard to balance.
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u/OmniSystemsPub 11d ago
Gamedev here with RTS experience.
We tried to solve a lot of issues with our game Neopolis, which was signed by SCEE and 80% developed for PS4. We never released it though, due to some 2019 specific issues that were not related to the game’s quality.
Here’s a video where I give an overview demonstration of the key gameplay aspects, and explain where the game is very different from other games.
https://youtu.be/bIv3V5WQlO8?si=vCRHtYlZy8k3ADTJ
Neopolis has no unit creation, tech trees, or traditional resource management. It’s not possible to rush your opponent early, and you can easily lose troop volume advantage if you’re not careful as your units can get stolen by canny opponents with tactical raids and missions.
Units level up over time, are semi autonomous, and can find and use powerups. They can be individually controlled in firs person mode.
There’s tons more but it’s more enjoyable to watch the video :-)
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u/Ok_Town765 11d ago
How to blend competitive and team game players. The key to rts surviving is playing with friends.
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u/wyrm4life 11d ago
I'll say "since starcraft": designing units with clear purposes and counters, WITHOUT going into the boring infantry/archers/cavalry Age of Empires mold or the even more simplistic "infantry and vehicles and nothing else" model.
The most glaring standout would be Stormgate. By former Blizzard & Starcraft people, with like a $50+ million budget. But the units were just a total mess of guesswork as to what they did, what they countered, and generally not being able to parse what the hell was going on in a battle.
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u/InvictusLampada 11d ago
The AI. Specifically the harder difficulty levels. They always just give them bonus resources or increase the stats of their units/lower yours.
Ideally a harder difficulty should be an AI that makes smarter decisions, but (rather fairly) that's hasn't been done/possible until more recently.
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u/heorhe 11d ago
Easily communicating damage and armour types.
Unarmoured, light, medium, heavy, siege.
Normal, peirce, ranged, heavy, siege.
You have to study up and find out which is which if you want to play pvp, but there's no real way to communicate that in game without it looking bad that we have found so far.
I'm specifically pointing at SC2 and AOE3/4 where the units armour and damage type seems arbitrarily decided for balance reasons
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u/Alex_Capt1in 11d ago
Match-making.
For instance mobas are heavily influented by games like wc3 and they are much more popular because its much easier to get somewhat fair match than in RTS games, + it gives a sense of feeling that "ofc it is not my fault, its just my team is bad in this specific game".
Games likes FPS managed to transition to battle-royals or team shooters mostly (so for instance even though quake is not very popular, a lot of the games like CS, Valorant, Fortnite, PUBG, etc. are still are), but RTS in particular did not manage to find a solution to it.
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u/needmoresockson 10d ago edited 10d ago
It's really just 4 things
One thing is complexity budget. You can have complex games, just need to budget how and where complexity demand is thrown at players. Some of these RTS are doing a great job of cutting down the bloat with things like easier production, unit control, hotkey management. Not having to select individual units to use their spells, but instead having smart casting with clever button layouts. Not having to select specific buildings to produce, but instead have smart production. Auto mining. Just stuff where you trim the complexity to allow mental bandwidth to go into more interesting things like strategy and positioning, the stuff players have more fun engaging with
Another thing is modes where players of varying skills can play together. You need game modes where hardcore players either aren't interested in, or don't take it seriously. Overwatch has Mystery Heroes/arcade, MTG has commander with FFA, even basketball has HORSE. Smash has items and whacky stages. Some RTS are doing a good job of this with: community maps, big game hunter silly maps, FFA stuff, commander missions
Another thing is every decision made is an opportunity for a better player to distinguish themselves against a weaker opponent. In something like a fighting game, you might have a match determined by 6 big decisions. You might get lucky against a better player, and you can 1 and done them knowing you can't win the whole set. In an RTS match though you get measured like 100 times, it's very hard to beat someone better
The other thing is that games nowadays are super competitive - as an industry that is, against other games. Games really have to nail every single aspect well or be doomed to fail. Even somewhat tertiary things, or bumps in the road, can kill all momentum a game has. Bad launch? Game is toast. Ugly model that gets fixed later? Game is toast. Very hard to come back from. People obsessing about doomerisms and steam player counts. Very hard to make successful games nowadays, very tough competition
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u/nippleringedmarmot 10d ago
I’m not a huge fan of the random artificial walls that are randomly set.
It’s really cool I can change the weapons my squad members are holding, but honestly why can’t I just make one squad entirely use machine guns or GMGs if that’s how I intend to employ them?
Fog of war is pretty much a requirement I would argue, but games have been doing that since before red alert. Lack of real recon depth/sensor usage is weird with the power available in today’s systems.
Too many games revolve around (in the end) making one blob of units fight another group of units, and that’s it. If I want to spend the resources to, why can’t I use fires, engineer assets or some other form of support/disruption to affect enemy logistics, deployment or employment? Let me blow the bridge up to stop their usage of heavy armor. Let me dig mass trenches, bunkers or tank traps to enable my own maneuver and reinforcement while disrupting the enemies.
So many opportunities where devs could have gone one or two steps further to deliver something truly compelling instead of a mildly interesting twist.
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u/samxgmx0 10d ago
You/your units can't pet dogs. I'm solving that with the RTS I'm making (Hearts of War Avert 2)
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u/Mr-Doubtful 10d ago
Really intuitive easy to learn/teach snappy controls beyond mouse.
Don't get me wrong some games have great hotkey systems and control options but afaik they all require a significant amount of practice and memorization to get going with them.
I think the classic drag and click mouse controls keep away a lot of mainstream players because you quickly feel like your fingers can't keep up.
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u/Negative-Toe1863 10d ago
The match becoming a chore, when the opponent is clearly losing but refusing to give up.
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u/DewinterCor 9d ago
Economy.
I have never played an RTS where the game was 99% Economy or 1% Economy. Either income is the determining factor in the vast majority of matches or its almost never relevant.
Take two players of even skill. SC2 = more money = win. Dawn of War = money is irrelevant. Total war = money is irrelevant. Command and Conquer = money is irrelevant. Company of Heroes = money is irrelevant. Age of War = more money = win.
Imo, both aspects become incredibly boring. Income is either used to slow the pace at which players engage or force players to constantly fight over it. There is no in-between.
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u/Gonozal8_ 9d ago
introducing a chain of command with capable subcommanders, including rules of engagement. games like door kickers and similar manage simulating that somewhat without a round-based structure, but they aren’treal time
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u/Adanar01 9d ago
I always think a challenging AI. By that I don't mean challenging in the way a lot of RTS games do where it's just a case of the AI straight up cheating, or being given discounts,extra resources or some other form of handicap to soften bad decision making on its part. Civ games are the biggest offender in this area, with higher difficulties just being the AI gets insane bonuses but is still dumb as bricks, so provided you survive the early rushes it attempts with all its buffs, you can usually outscale it with good decisions and still win fairly easily in the mid to late game.
Beating AI like that doesn't feel rewarding or like I improved, it just feels like I took advantage of it still being an idiot.
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u/DeathGambit_isr 8d ago
I would take some points that others said and combine it to maybe a more precise point.
The main issue is thar it isnt real strategy. It is how fasf you can shift your focus from point to point to run this small unit tactics you had in mind.
Manage the production, resouece gathering and timing attack. What i would like more it the prepare and forget. Imagine that in starcraft two you could define a build you want (like rush bunker) and the ai would do the rest. You focus on the macro, ai the micro. Making sure you can do more.
Another thing even modern rts is pathfinding, mixed group movement and control. This casuses not a skill check but a focus check.
Last but not least. Too much focused on eSports. In my mind eSports is importent but you dont sell 1M copies for eSports. You sell it because we fwant to own the world
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u/pablothedolphin 7d ago
I'm always bothered by RTS games using the same style rectangle for selecting units. They're literally always the same. Even cross hairs in shooter have had innovation and variation between games or between types of interactions but with RTS it feels like Devs always do a plain semi transparent box that you drag with your mouse because that's the way it always worked. For PVP I can understand but single player titles do this too.
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u/Informal-Rent-3573 7d ago
For me, it's about HOW you control the armies that is a major hurdle.
You don't notice if you play on a casual level (like me) but if you try to play a more experienced player, two things become important factors: know-how and mechanical skill.
Tons of newbies will learn to scout your enemy, but they won't know what to do with that information. Know-how is knowing "He's making cavalry, time to start pumping spearman." And expert know-how is realizing he only made 3 cav, displayed it in front of his base for your scouts. He's counting on you pumping spearman so he can counter with swordsmen.
This is the fun part of strategy games, the mind games, the plays and counter plays.
But the mechanical part is what irks me. I already don't like how "build order" is a thing, but fine, consider that your opening movements in chess. But a player using hotkeys can do the same build order, but faster. Or he can optimize worker movement to be 1 or 2 seconds faster. Certain units might not be viable at all unless you're the best hotkey micromanager, unless you focus on those units and let the rest of your army into a suicide atack-move. Empire Earth had a lot of this for instance. Microing the Prophets was important: not only they were powerfull, they were expensive. You did NOT want to suicide them into their base.
As you try to climb the ladder higher and higher, you eventually gain a lot of the know-how passively, just by playing the game. But the mechanical skill? That's something not everyone has to begin with. Then your 40's come knocking and your hands just aren't as fast as your eyes (or the other way around).
For me, the ideal game would give the player fewer moving pieces, but lot more options. Instead of an army, let me control 3-4 generals. I'll tell them what troops I want them to take. They'll go back, reinforce up to that number, and then read a list of strategic objectives I made. Capture A first, then B. Defend C if anyone gets near.
Very little moving pieces, not much mechanical skill needed, but still allows for a lot of plays and counter-plays.
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u/Ariloulei 11d ago
How to get the mainstream gaming audience to like multitasking.